Fun Palaces don’t have to be big and shiny, perfect, polished or expensive. They’re not fêtes or festivals, they are tiny revolutions of connection between people (sometimes on a large scale), while sharing an activity. The most important thing about a Fun Palace is that it brings people together, and you can do that for free. 

“That is what a Fun Palace is, right? It’s not about producing new stuff, it’s not about buying stuff; it’s about sharing.”
– Fun Palaces Maker

Around 80% of Fun Palaces are made each year without any additional funding and by Fun Palaces Makers using resources they already have.

Low Cost Activities:

If you’re stuck for some ideas for cheap and free activities, why not try:

• Teaching some words from a language 
• Junk sculptures
• Sharing advice on gardening / the best foraging spots (or anything you have knowledge about)
• Getting together to choreograph a dance. 
• A Fun Palaces community walk
• A group poetry / writing session (run by yourselves)
• Building a bug hotel out of found materials
• Sharing stories from your local culture or community

Or something else that you love doing! 

“The people of Deptford know you can have a lot of fun with not very much, Deptford’s quite used to doing that, nobody’s ever got money to do things, and we just sort of miraculously make things happen.” – Past Fun Palaces Maker, The Albany. 

Low cost and small is great, however, sometimes we want to do something a bit bigger and include more people, and that can be an important part of Fun Palace Making too. We ran our annual funding workshop online last Friday. It was packed with top tips and ideas for making Fun Palaces on a budget, and getting a bit of extra funding if you need to. We were fortunate to be joined by Lisa Straccia from JIGSAW Thornbury, who are veteran Fun Palace Makers,who shared some of her top tips on raising funds and keeping costs low. 

Here’s what Lisa said: 

Keep costs down:

Our first year was 2021, we started to try and think what we could do cheaply, so we had:

• Someone from a local farm give a talk on fruit trees and how to look after them. 

• A young person taught the Mayor how to do sim car racing. 
• Science experiments – showing how to make rainbows with coloured pens, water and paper

Anything we thought would be cheap and quick to do. And we had around 100 people, so we wanted to do it again the following year. This is now our 5th year. Last year we had 22 activities over 5 areas, we got the whole town involved. 

Ask people you know: friends, neighbours, colleagues, contacts

We’ve always been a bit cheeky, and have asked people working in similar areas to us, with a similar ethos and have asked them to get involved. We’ve found it’s quite infectious, when people think they’re missing out, it gets quite competitive and everyone wants to get involved. 

Ask your local council:

A lot have some kind of community development regeneration. We found our local contact there, and she got quite involved early on, and as a result we got £400. We spent that on food, as we thought that might encourage people to come in. An organisation lent us a BBQ and we bought the hot dogs and burgers. 

The council also printed posters and maps for us. 

Huge thanks to Lisa for sharing her experience of securing some funding from the council. 

What other Fun Palaces have done in the past:

Brockwell Lido Fun Palace asked local businesses for sponsorship, raising money and loads of help in kind as well. Leighton Buzzard Fun Palace also receives sponsorship form a local estate agency to help cover costs.

Whitstable Museum of Fun went to a local council meeting and asked for money to cover workshop costs –and they got it.

BedPop Fun Palace in Bedford had sponsorship from a local company and many local venues provided their spaces for free.

Lambeth Libraries Fun Palaces received Arts Council Grants for the Arts funding to support their 11 hyper-local Fun Palaces.

Dragon’s Den Fun Palace in Sittingbourne had support from their local Rotary group to help provide water and electricity to their facilities-free venue.

Some Fun Palaces received small local government grants, others had help from local venues or were housed in venues that covered the costs themselves.

Some other places you might find funding:

Heritage Lottery Fund
Arts Councils – Arts Council England, Arts Council Wales, Creative Scotland, Arts Council Northern Ireland 
Alec Dickson Trust
Co-op Community Fund
People’s Postcode Trust 
People’s Health Trust 
The Aviva Community Fund 

There’s more information on each of these funders and on making Fun Palaces on a budget in our Funding Toolkit.